- Related Topics:
- Red Scare
- discrimination
- social differentiation
- On the Web:
- Museum of Broadcast Communications - Blacklisting (Oct. 25, 2026)
blacklisting
The relationship between broadcasting and political affairs has been close since radio’s launch in 1920. The ability to transmit messages to potentially large audiences made broadcasting a tantalizing prospect to all politicians. The divisive political struggle between conservatives and liberals in the United States influenced that country’s broadcasting industry most visibly and negatively during the period known as the Red Scare (sometimes called the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to the mid-1950s). Although news media are constitutionally protected from government influence in the United States, the historical reality is that broadcasting is frequently susceptible to political pressures, which meant that the risk, and practice, of blacklisting—individuals being denied employment or other opportunities because of political associations considered undesirable—was particularly strong during this period.
In the early decades of the Cold War, which began in 1945, there was a growing distrust of communism and a deep-seated fear that “Reds” were infiltrating the United States. Political conservatives sought and identified suspected Communists in every walk of life. Although anti-Communists vigorously asserted that they were responding to a threat to national security, historical evidence is ambiguous. Some historians interpret the Red Scare as a conservative backlash against liberals long in power. Research carried out in the former Soviet Union after its collapse has revealed that the Soviets did successfully infiltrate several institutions in the United States during the 1940s and ’50s. At the time, however, with little evidence to support the Red denunciations but innuendo and blacklists, the fear of being labeled a Communist left the country nearly paralyzed.
The broadcasting industry was susceptible to politically motivated attacks for a number of reasons. Significantly, broadcasters are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is overseen by the legislative branch. Further complicating their vulnerability to the Red Scare was broadcast dependence upon sponsors. Until about 1960, network entertainment programs were produced by sponsors and their advertising agencies. The considerable profits reaped by selling airtime enabled broadcast networks to subsidize news and public affairs programming. Accordingly, accusations of coddling Communists threatened that relationship. At the same time, the rapid transition from radio to television placed networks and stations under greater financial pressure.
" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">
Network response
Although the influence of the Red Scare on broadcasting started as early as 1941, a single publication in June 1950 escalated political pressure on the industry. A conservative group issued a paperback book titled Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television that took the form of a blacklist that publicly identified an individual with communism with the intent of denying employment and socially alienating the accused. Red Channels listed the names of nearly 150 individuals, including 10 broadcast journalists. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) took immediate notice of Red Channels, although the two networks responded differently.
NBC was undeterred by Red Channels or other blacklists and rarely denied employment to a person accused of being a Communist. NBC was a subsidiary of RCA, one of the most profitable and powerful corporations of the mid-20th century, and was led by David Sarnoff, whose power over NBC/RCA was unquestioned and whose conservative politics were indisputable. Further, NBC enjoyed the luxury of RCA’s financial resources to support it through the transition from radio to television. For these reasons, NBC could financially and politically afford to risk criticism for failing to heed the blacklists; its corporate and political credentials were above reproach.
CBS was more vulnerable as it lacked the financial largesse that NBC enjoyed from RCA. By 1950, when Red Channels was published, CBS was involved in two very expensive endeavors: developing its television network and its consequent need for programming and affiliates, and the innovation of a color television system. Further complicating the situation was the perception that network chief William S. Paley was considered politically liberal. These factors prompted CBS to respond very differently to Red Channels. It developed a two-layer system of investigating alleged subversive activities of its employees. A clearance system vetted talent for suspicious activity and individuals whose names were blacklisted were fired or not hired by CBS. The second layer required employees to sign loyalty oaths on which they swore they were not and never had been Communists.
The elite corps of broadcast journalists at CBS, led by Edward R. Murrow and including Eric Sevareid, William L. Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Alexander Kendrick, and Don Hollenbeck, was incensed by the loyalty oaths. Nevertheless, Murrow encouraged his team of journalists to sign the oath, as he did himself. Murrow chose his battles carefully and was already considering future broadcast investigations of the Red Scare; thus he was willing to sign the loyalty oath. CBS’s willingness to institute a loyalty oath for its employees revealed the lengths to which the network went to protect itself and its business interests.
The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.
SUBSCRIBE
Broadcast journalists
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?” Although relatively few broadcast journalists were asked this question before a congressional hearing, being labeled as suspected Communist or sympathizer was an anxiety that many endured. Radio commentators were an early target of Counterattack, the newsletter that began publishing in 1947 as, in the words of writer David Everitt, an “anti-Red muckraking publication that would drag not only Communists but all their defenders out into the light.” Anti-Communists feared journalists would use their access to the airwaves to broadcast views favoring Communist positions and responded by publicly naming journalists they believed to be Communist sympathizers.
In 1950, the publishers of Counterattack released Red Channels and identified 10 broadcast journalists whose political affiliations allegedly indicated Communist sympathies. The list included prominent journalists such as Kendrick and Shirer, as well as Howard K. Smith and Lisa Sergio. The evidence cited was questionable, largely depending upon the testimony of suspected Communists before congressional committees, or on the speeches, appearances, or organizational memberships of the journalists. For example, chief among Shirer’s offenses was that he signed a petition to the Supreme Court encouraging reversal of the convictions of the Hollywood Ten for refusing to testify as to their political beliefs. Smith allegedly criticized the U.S. government for meddling in the 1948 Italian elections. Kendrick’s offenses included publishing essays in New Masses and Soviet Russia Today and leading a panel discussion during a meeting of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Sergio, a commentator and broadcast journalist for both NBC and ABC, was cited for signing a petition that urged outlawing antisemitism.
It is notable that none of the evidence that Red Channels listed against the 10 broadcast journalists included any actual broadcasts. Smith and Kendrick later reported that their inclusion on the blacklist did not affect their professional or personal lives. Shirer, on the other hand, believed that being blacklisted had a significant impact on his career, and soon after his Red Channels appearance he left broadcasting and turned to freelance writing and lecturing. Interestingly, Soviet archives later revealed that one of the lesser-known journalists included in Red Channels, Johannes Steel, was indeed a Soviet agent.
Blacklisting was accomplished through other means in addition to Red Channels. Aware, Inc. was formed in 1953 to ferret out Communists from radio and television. It produced “Publication No. 12” in which suspected Communists were named and, as John Cogley writes in Report on Blacklisting, “decreed ‘unemployable.’” Other journalists were identified in the popular press. One of the tragic repercussions of blacklisting was the case of Don Hollenbeck, who worked for CBS News and was identified as a Communist-sympathizer by Jack O’Brian, a columnist for the Hearst-owned New York Journal American. Hollenbeck’s subsequent suicide in June 1954 was understood to be partly the result of being blacklisted. Whatever the means of public identification, the reputations and credibility of broadcast journalists suffered as a result of extreme political pressures.
News programs
Fundamentally, the Red Scare in broadcasting came down to concerns about content. Although there is no evidence to suggest that any broadcast journalist communicated pro-Communist messages, blacklisters nonetheless feared that they might. Anti-Communists sought to prevent the spread of communism by creating a climate of fear in which journalists self-censored their material. Broadcast journalists who were blacklisted correctly understood that they were targeted because their personal convictions challenged conservative politics.
Although the networks and many advertisers capitulated to the atmosphere of fear, either tacitly like NBC or overtly like CBS, one voice of resistance was heard amid the silence. By the autumn of 1953, Murrow, arguably the most influential broadcast journalist of his time, decided to confront the Red Scare. In a series of reports broadcast for his television program See It Now, Murrow hosted a number of investigations into prominent figures of the Red Scare, including U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Milo Radulovich and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss. Radulovich had been dismissed from the Air Force for maintaining close relationships with suspected Communists (his father and sister), while Moss was suspended from her clerical position for being a suspected Communist. The most influential and historically significant broadcast, however, was Murrow’s March 1954 investigation of the tactics used by Senator Joseph McCarthy, in which Murrow used television clips to skillfully and publicly denounce the senator.
Although Murrow did not espouse a pro-Communist message, he adeptly used television to publicly challenge the power of the leading anti-Communist crusader. Even so, the business aspects of the broadcasts remained paramount. Murrow had to get his sponsor’s permission to shift its commercials, and CBS refused to advertise the programs for fear of the political and commercial backlash. Nonetheless, many historians consider the Murrow-McCarthy broadcast to be one of the more important in the history of television as an early example of the mediums power, particularly in the hands of a skilled and credible journalist.
Implications
The Red Scare started to fade with the U.S. Senate’s censure of McCarthy in 1954, and blacklisting was fully exposed and discredited in 1962 when Aware, Inc. was found guilty of libel when it blacklisted an actor. With enough political and historical distance, industry leaders such as Paley and Frank Stanton of CBS later regretted instituting the loyalty oaths and using blacklists. Certainly the lives of blacklisted figures were changed, some more than others.
The Red Scare period of blacklisting is a case study of the dangers of using political yardsticks to measure journalists. Although anti-Communists did not directly engage in prior restraint, their accusations and blacklists had a strongly chilling effect on broadcast journalists whose personal politics were used as evidence of their lack of objectivity and credibility. The end result was that one of the most significant news stories of the 1950s received remarkably little broadcast news attention.
The tenuous relationship between U.S. politics and broadcasting reverberated after the decline of the Red Scare through the rest of the 20th century. Walter Cronkite’s denunciation of the Vietnam War in 1968 was a turning point in the public’s antiwar attitudes. U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon used the FCC to target television stations that opposed his politics. In 1987 the FCC formally repealed the fairness doctrine, and its loosening of station ownership restrictions played a role in the continuing political dynamic between conservatives and liberals as the country faced the 21st century.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE Encyclopedia of Journalism.